Huong Ha

Empowerment in the Hospitality Industry in the United States

This study explores the impact of organizational antecedents (i.e., self-managed teams, career advancement, work environment, and leadership, and of individual antecedents (e.g., gender, age, job level, and tenure) on employee empowerment in the hospitality industry. A total of 532 valid responses from a survey conducted in 60 hotels in the United States were received. Data were analyzed using factor analysis and correlation analysis. Findings suggest that self-management, work environment, and leadership are reliable predictors of employee empowerment in the hotel sector. Empowerment makes employees feel better about their jobs and themselves. Organizations need to learn that empowering employees to improve their performance requires a fundamental shift in the entire organizational culture—a much bigger job than it was initially perceived to be.

Governance approaches to mitigation of and adaptation to climate change in Asia

1. Governance Approaches for Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change in Asia: An Introduction Huong Ha and Tek Nath Dhakal PART I: ISSUES AND IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE IN ASIA 2. Climate Change, Vanishing Ecosystems and the Challenge of Achieving Human Prosperity Amita Singh 3. The Interplay between Climate Change, Economy and Displacement: Experience from Asia A.K.M. Ahsan Ullah 4. Disaster Communication in Mitigating Climate Change in Sri Lanka: Problems and Prospects R. Lalitha S. Fernando 5. Climate Change and Global Environmental Governance: The Asian Experience Gamini Herath PART II: PRECONDITIONS OF GOOD GOVERNANCE AND THE ROLE OF DIFFERENT SECTORS 6. Approaches for Climate Change Adaptation: A Case Study of Agriculture Initiatives in Japan Izumi Tsurita, S.V.R.K. Prabhakar and Daisuke Sano 7. How Adaptive Policies are in Japan and Can Adaptive Policies Mean Effective Policies?: Some Implications for Governing Climate Change Adaptation S.V.R.K. Prabhakar, Misa Aoki and Reina Mashimo 8. Management of Climate Induced National Security: Paradigm Shift from Geopolitics to Carbon Politics Md Shafiqul Islam 9. Deconstructing Debate on National Action Plan on Climate Change at the State Level: A Case Study of Meghalaya State, India Ashok Kumar Singha, Suvra Majumdar, Abhik Saha and Somnath Hazra 10. The Role of Government and the Private Sector in Mitigating and Adapting to Climate Change Vinay Sharma PART III: GOVERNANCE APPROACHES FOR MANAGING CLIMATE CHANGE 11. Integrated Governance and Adaptation to Climate Change Ken Coghill and Ramanie Samaratunge 12. Climate Change Governance: Singapore Case Huong Ha 13. Governance Framework to Mitigate Climate Change: Challenges in Urbanising India Mahendra Sethi and Subhakanta Mohapatra 14. Unripe Fruits or Non-Raining Clouds?: Climate Change Governance and Funding Dilemma in Nepal Bimal Raj Regmi and Dinanath Bhandari 15. Environmental Legislations and Actions in Polity, Economy and Culture for Climate Change Adaptation: A Case Study of Misamis Oriental Province, the Philippines Isaias S. Sealza and Huong Ha 16. Responses to Climate Change - Who is Responsible?: A Conclusion Tek Nath Dhakal and Huong Ha

Security and Privacy in E-consumer Protection in Victoria, Australia

Governments in many countries have actively promoted both regulatory and self-regulatory approaches to govern e-commerce and to protect e-consumers. Nevertheless, the desired outcomes of e-consumer protection have not fully materialised. Although there are many research projects about e-commerce, security, privacy, trust, etc., few relate to e-consumer protection. In addition, most projects on e-consumer protection only focus on individual issues, rather than examining the entire coverage of the protection of e-consumers. This paper, a theoretical one, aims to fill these gaps by (i) identifying five issues in e-consumer protection, (ii) discussing the current regulatory and non-regulatory framework of e-consumer protection, (iii) examining the effectiveness of this current framework, and (iv) proposing how this framework can be improved to address current and future problems. This paper will use Victoria, Australia as a case study and takes into account the view of all stakeholders.

Service quality and student/customer satisfaction in the private tertiary education sector in Singapore

Purpose This paper focuses on students’ perceptions of the quality of non-academic services received in higher education. While the important role played by expectations and perceptions in students’ evaluations of such services has been discussed in much of the service quality literature, there is insufficient work in the private tertiary educational sector (PTES). Thus, the purpose of this paper is to examine the relationships between service quality, student satisfaction, and behavioural intentions in the PTES, using Singapore as a case study. Design/methodology/approach This study adopted quantitative research to address the research questions. Primary data were collected from 324 valid responses from a survey conducted in two private tertiary educational institutes (PTEIs) in Singapore. Findings The results suggested that perceived service quality is positively correlated to satisfaction; perceived service quality and satisfaction are positively correlated to favourable behavioural intentions; and the relationships among perceived service quality and loyalty and paying more for a service are mediated by satisfaction. Originality/value This study is significant as the results provide better insights for Singaporean administrators in PTEIs, which is an under-researched area. Generally, the results will have far-reaching implications for all stakeholders in the delivery and consumption of education services in PTEIs, within and beyond Singapore.

Land Use and Disaster Governance: Implications and Policy Recommendations

This chapter summarises what has been discussed in the previous chapters. It discusses the implications of governance approaches to plan and manage land, ensure food security, reduce disaster risk, manage disasters and other associated issues. The way land is planned, distributed and used has certainly entails consequences to food security and disaster risk reduction and other associated issues.

Land Use and Disaster Governance in Asia: An Introduction

This chapter provides an overview of land use and management, and disaster governance and the justification of the need for novel and innovation governance approaches to address risk reduction, and disaster management at different levels and in different contexts in Asia. The chapter also summarises the key issues discussed in each chapter. Although different countries have adopted various governance approaches, including policy, technological and education initiatives, to (i) manage land, (ii) improve food security, (iii) reduce risk, (iv) prepare for disasters and (v) address the impact of disasters; the outcomes of such initiatives are limited. Therefore, the quest for new strategic management and governance models has been an ongoing task of all stakeholders.

Bangladesh: Natural Disaster Risk Management

Bangladesh with impressive gross domestic product (GDP) growth rates for over a decade is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Yet, Bangladesh is also considered one of the most disaster-prone countries. Floods, cyclones and storm surge, tornadoes, drought, erosion, landslide and earthquakes are regular phenomena that have created a massive impact on the economic well-being and welfare of the people. This chapter aims to (i) revisit key natural disasters and their associated issues in Bangladesh, (ii) examine institutional and regulatory frameworks as well as measures to manage disasters, including pre-disaster planning and post-disaster recovery and (iii) assess the current initiatives to manage disasters against the three-sector governance model, including government, the private sector and civil society. The chapter also includes some policy and technical recommendations to enhance the state of disaster risk management (DRM) in the country.

Energy, governance and security in Thailand and Myanmar (Burma): a critical approach to environmental politics in the south

book by ‘adding women’ to assessments of states dependent on the global resource trade. The book serves as a useful starting point for those interested in critically examining the philosophical aspects of global justice and global gender inequities, and provides a useful framework of transnational theorizing on (gendered) global justice issues. It provides important theoretical frameworks, especially in the editorial work done by Jaggar in the introduction, and while some of the cases could be expanded both theoretically and conceptually, they again provide the impetus for further research in this important area. The book would be of interest to those whose work relates to broad themes of transnationalism and transnational advocacy collectives, and global justice and development issues, especially those who engage critically in these fields from a feminist perspective. Importantly, the book also contends that the transnational is an important spatial dimension in understanding global gender injustice.

Model order selection for continuous time instrumental variable methods using regularization

The aim of this paper is to propose a new method to select the model order in continuous time system identification, instrumental variable methods. The idea is to over-parameterize the model and utilize regularization based on the l1 norm to obtain a sparse estimate. The model order of the identified system is then determined by the rank of the Hankel matrix of the estimated parameter. Simulation results show that the proposed method works very effectively. For low signal to noise ratio (SNR), it offers a significant improvement to existing model order selection methods with the performance at high SNR comparable to the existing methods.

Disaster Management in Asia: Lessons Learned and Policy Implications

This chapter draws several lessons learned from the previous chapters. It also discusses the policy implications of governance approaches to mitigate disaster risk and manage pre- and post-disaster processes in order to reduce both economic and human loss caused by disasters. The authors of these chapters consistently point out that the way disaster risk management strategies and frameworks are formulated and implemented, the coordination among stakeholders in all the three sectors (government, the private sector and civil society) and the availability of resources have consequences to disaster risk reduction and other associated issues.